Through the Eyes of the Handschar: The Zvonimir Bernwald Chronicles, Part III

Another bonus for paid subs that continues the Muslim Nazis prologue

Zvonimir Bernwald realized that he had many challenges ahead of him, but he was ready. Working for the SS as a translator had paid dividends for him and his family, as best he could tell, but there was increasing talk about the need for religious interpreters for the new division. Specifically, Islamic imams. For that, there would need to be a training course for the imams that would provide them with the proper approach to using Islam alongside the tenets of National Socialism in ways—and a language—that the men who would make up this new division would understand.

Zvonimir was optimistic, but had concerns, since as he put it in his memoir, “I was not a Bosnian expert,” despite the fact that “in high school there were a lot of Muslim schoolmates and in my parents' house Muslims also came in and out.” Nevertheless, thanks to his time working as an interpreter for the Wehrmacht as a teenager back in 1941, he had been able to serve as an intermediary between the Germans and the Muslims living around Mount Kozara in Bosnia, and this likely helped build the Nazis' confidence in his abilities and soon they were asking him a wide variety of questions to which he needed to give satisfactory answers. In fact, it was, to Zvonimir's memory, “hundreds of questions.” Continuing, he recalled the process of creating this program as follows: